Under Tomorrow's Sky is an incredible multimedia fictional future city

This article was taken from the September 2013 issue of
Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print
before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of
additional content by subscribing
online.

Step away from your spreadsheets, ye staid urban planners: Warren Ellis, Bruce Sterling and an all-comers association of
madcap technologists and researchers are designing an experimental
city. Under
Tomorrow's Sky began last August in Eindhoven as a discussion
between writers, designers, architects, filmmakers and more. "We
looked at emerging research in technology and biology -- research
that is typically locked away behind the wall of an institution,"
says Liam Young, the architect who created the project. "Then we
started to exaggerate those processes."

A scale model created for
the Under Tomorrow's Sky film

Under Tomorrow's Sky

The result is a fictional future city that will exist as ebook
short stories, films, comics, concept art and even a physical scale
model, to be shown at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale in
September. "The idea is that this city becomes a stage set where
authors, illustrators and filmmakers would have a model --
physically and conceptually -- to tell the stories of life in the city," says Young. "What are the social
networks, who lives there, why, what are their lives like?" It's
less science fiction, more design fiction. "The process is about
co-opting traditional formats of science fiction -- films, comics,
video games, the mediums that people readily associate with the
future. But rather than some fantasy filmmaker view, we want to
build it into a critical investigation of emerging technologies and
biologies. Is this a future we want to be moving towards, or is it
a cautionary tale?"

The city has only recently been founded, but Young wants to
scale it up so that people "can inhabit it at a one-to-one scale",
then take it around the world. "Just like any city, it's never
fixed or finished -- it's always added to, demolished, rebuilt. I
want this to be an evolving experiment."